Greek food & drinks to try in Athens

Athens is a huge city with lots of options to try out from food perspective. There are tons of local restaurants all around the city serving traditional Greek food. However, if you have to really act like a local, then ‘Souvlaki‘ is the ‘first’ go to thing. Followed by Gyros. Souvlaki is a Greek fast food made with small pieces of meat (or vegetables) grilled on a skewer and wrapped in a pita bread with some paste or a sauce and sometimes, garnished with tomato and/or basil leaves. There are lot of places/points all around Athens where you can get these with different kind of meats.

Few of the places where we ate Souvlaki: Atrium (our own Hotel restaurant), Tylixto & O Kostas. And we loved from all of them 🙂

Next Greeky thing to try: Greek salads – they are available in almost every cafe/restaurant and you will never get over with it, mainly becuase of variety they have. The one we liked most was Thessolonian salad which we had at our hotel restaurant, Atrium.

Not-to-be missed Loukoumades: traditional Greek dessert made by deep frying the dough, spiced up with cinnamon in honey syrup and topped with nuts. Must not be missed. We ate at the famous Lukumades bakery right in the Athens city centre and being the first timer, we stuck to the classic one 🙂

Since we were there during Christmas time, we got the chance to taste few of their traditional Christmas delicacies:

On top is – Greek Diples – pastries with honey;

Below on left is Melomakarona – honey cookies;

And on right is Kourabeithes – sugar almond cookie. –> I personally loved this one!

From drinks perspective: try Ouzo. Even though Greeks call it as summer drink and many non-Greeks call it weird (becuase of it’s taste), I thoroughly enjoyed it during winter. It has to be drink on the rocks and taken slowly by soaking in the environment.

Drink Frappes and Freddo Cappuccino – both of them are very addictive. For me, it was more of latter that won the heart! Freddo Cappuccino is actually the cold version of a cappuccino and usually has cold milk-based foam known as ‘aphrogala’ on top of it. One place I can recommend for trying out is Off White cafe near Monastiraki Square. But again, they are available in almost all cafes and restaurants.

A advice at the end: if you want to really taste the Greek food, avoid the restaurants at touristic places like Makrigianni street – they will try to sell you as if they are best and serve traditional, but in reality they are not even close. Check sites like TripAdvisor before getting in….

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